Every two weeks, Amazon deposits a lump sum in your bank account. If your bookkeeper records that deposit as 'Amazon sales,' your books are wrong — possibly badly wrong. That deposit is sales minus referral fees, minus FBA fulfillment fees, minus storage, minus refunds, plus reimbursements, plus or minus a dozen other adjustment types, sometimes with money held in reserve. The document that explains it is the settlement report.
What's inside a settlement report
Amazon's V2 settlement flat file lists every transaction that contributed to the payout, line by line. Each line carries the order ID, the SKU, the quantity, and three classification fields — transaction type, amount type, and amount description — plus the amount. A single customer order typically produces several lines: the principal price, shipping, tax collected, the referral fee, the FBA fee.
The first row is the summary: settlement ID, period start and end, deposit date, currency, and the total. A correct accounting process must tie every line back to that total exactly — if the lines don't sum to the deposit, something was missed.
Why summary journals beat order-by-order syncing
Some tools push every order into QuickBooks or Xero as an invoice. At volume this bloats your ledger into uselessness — thousands of tiny invoices, slow files, and no easier reconciliation. The professional standard is the opposite: post one summarized journal entry per settlement, with totals per account (sales, fees, refunds, reimbursements, reserves), and keep SKU-level detail in a subledger. Your P&L stays clean, your bank feed matches one deposit to one journal, and reconciliation takes seconds.
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The accounts you need
- •Amazon Sales (income) — item principal
- •Promotional Rebates (contra-income) — promos and discounts
- •Amazon Referral Fees, FBA Fulfillment Fees, FBA Storage Fees (expenses)
- •Amazon Refunds (contra-income) and Refund Admin Fees (expense)
- •FBA Reimbursements (other income) — what Amazon pays you back
- •Sales Tax / Marketplace Facilitator Tax (liability) — tax Amazon collects and remits
- •Amazon Reserved Balances (asset) — funds held this settlement, released the next
- •Amazon Clearing (bank-type) — where the net deposit lands and matches your bank feed
Doing it automatically
BeanHawk pulls each settlement, parses every line, maps each transaction type to your chart of accounts (with sensible defaults you can change), refuses to post anything that doesn't balance to the penny, and posts one clean summarized journal to QuickBooks Online or Xero. Multi-currency marketplaces post in their own currency; unknown new transaction types are flagged for review instead of silently mis-booked.